Modulation systems and methods are widely used in transmitters to modulate information including voice and/or data onto a carrier. The carrier may be a final carrier or an intermediate carrier. The carrier frequency can be in UHF, VHF, RF, microwave or any other frequency band. Modulators are also referred to as "mixers" or "multipliers". For example, in a mobile radiotelephone, a modulator is used in the radiotelephone transmitter.
In modern radiotelephone communications, mobile radiotelephones continue to decrease in size, cost and power consumption. In order to satisfy these objectives, it is generally desirable to provide modulation systems and methods that can provide high power modulation while reducing the amount of battery power that is consumed. Unfortunately, the power amplifier of a modulator may consume excessive power due to efficiency limitations therein. More specifically, it is known to provide linear Class-A or Class-AB power amplifiers that may have efficiencies as low as 30% or less. Thus, large amounts of battery power may be wasted as heat.
In modulation systems and methods, it is known to provide a desired modulation of a radio signal as a stream of complex numbers including a real part and an imaginary part. Such a stream of complex numbers may be generated by a digital signal processor in a radiotelephone. Systems and methods for modulating a stream of complex numbers are described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,815,531 to the present co-inventor Dent entitled "Transmitter for Encoded Data Bits", assigned to the assignee of the present invention, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated herein by reference.
As described in the '531 patent, Quadrature Amplitude Modulated signals are generated from data bits by using a first Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK) modulator for encoding a first pair of the data bits into one of four carrier signal phases, thereby producing a first QPSK signal. A second QPSK modulator encodes a second pair of the data bits into one of four carrier signal phases, thereby producing a second QPSK signal. The first QPSK signal is amplified to a first power level, and the second QPSK signal is amplified to a second power level. The first and second amplified signals are then combined to produce a signal in which four data bits are encoded. Offset Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (OQPSK) may be used in place of the first and second QPSK modulators, so that an Offset Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (OQAM) transmitter is formed. An OQPSK modulator encodes data bits by encoding a first sub-group of the data bits into a real part of a complex signal at an odd instant of a clock, and by encoding a second sub-group of the data bits into an imaginary part of the complex signal at an even instant of the clock. OQPSK modulation provides the benefit of having all signal transitions being constrained to trajectories around constant radius circles, thereby producing spectral efficiency. See the '531 patent abstract.
Notwithstanding the improvements of the above described patent, there continues to be a need for improved methods and systems for converting a stream of complex numbers representing a desired modulation of a radio signal into a modulated radio power signal at a radio carrier frequency. Preferably, these systems and methods can perform conversion at high efficiencies so that the size, cost and/or power consumption of the modulation system may be reduced.